From Proust to Gide to Genet the writers progressively express rather than imply the homosexuality that one must presume was an inescapable and primary fact of their selfhood.How does the documented homosexuality of Gide, Genet, and Proust inform the unfolding of their artistic design?
Proust develops or rather adumbrates the theme: The ambiguity of Marcel's early relationship to Baron de Charlus in The Guermantes Way, when Charlus is essentially engaged in an elaborate seduction that is disguised as a hale effort to take a naive Marcel under his wing in society, is stretched through the length of the novel. Only in the opening scene of Cities of the Plain (i.e., Sodom and Gomorrah) does Marcel understand that, in psychological repose, his social mentor is a "man-woman" who has "the features, the expression, the smile thereof," of a woman (Proust, Cities 626 et passim). Further, Marcel witnesses a dumb show of the first flirtation between Charlus and the servant Jupien, a flirtation that is carried forward through the time of The Captive to a full-blown, long-term, rather decadent affair. What then develops is Proust's detailed examination of the rather squalid environment of what Proust persistently, though not exclusively, terms the invert, which we as critics know to have been a principal constituent of Proust's own selfhood. In the first-person narrative, Marcel is consumed by a woman, Albertine, for good and ill, and the novel--though certainly not the entire work--ends with his resolve to marry her. But repeatedly the text hints broadly at or returns to inversion of both men and women, to allusions to the sexual demimonde in Balzac, to the freewheeling sexuality of Paris, which decisively includes virtually every permutation of the belle-epoque homosexual way of life.
Proust's conceit of providing Marcel with an all-consuming and heterosexual being seems therefore oddly successful at setting out clues that sexual identity, ...